Marketing and Sales on Ulitzer

A budding entrepreneur recently asked me, "How much time and money do you spend marketing?"

As I thought about ways we're taking WorkXpress to market, I realized most of them were invented within the past decade. First, we have spent an enormous amount of time and money developing our Web site. These days, a Web site is all-consuming. It includes positioning, branding, support, infrastructure, training materials, community development, sales operations, bug reporting. The list goes on. There is not a single facet of our business that doesn't touch the Web site.

This past weekend, we wanted to test our message of "empowerment" on a focus group. We sent one of our team members to a BarCamp in Philadelphia. At a Bar Camp, organizers prepare the location, set times and administrate a few other functions, but members largely determine the topics they want to speak about and hear about. We diligently noted reactions, questions and responses -- just like a focus group.

Second, whenever we have something to say, we use our social networks. We let the world know what we're doing, what's new, what we like or don't like on sites that include Twitter and LinkedIn.

Third, we like to e-mail newsletters. It's a great way to periodically tell everyone your news.

We also spend time enhancing our search-engine status.
And we write a lot of articles. Articles get picked up by search engines. They get reprinted by other industry publication sites and they find their way onto blogs. If you do a good job, they get used as a starting point or reference for someone else's article, and your message propagates.

There are so many ways to get messages out there. And all of them are new or take a new approach to old methods.

This blog was originally posted on the Central Penn Business Journal's Gadget Cube.